The Schwartz Report

Adobe Taps Azure To Run its Entire SaaS Portfolio

Microsoft kicked off its annual Ignite conference for IT pros and developers by announcing that Adobe's software-as-a-service offerings will run primarily in the Azure public cloud. Adobe President and CEO Shantanu Narayen joined Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella on stage in opening moments of the kickoff keynote session of Ignite, taking place all week in Atlanta.

The two announced the extension of a partnership kicked off two years ago when the two companies worked together to optimize Adobe's apps for Windows 10 and Microsoft's Surface PC tablet. In addition to running the Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud on Azure, the companies' new partnership includes optimizing the latter for the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite.

"We think there is an opportunity out of the box to provide integration for all of our joint customers to have one integrated sales and marketing service, Narayen said. For Microsoft, Adobe's decision to run its massive SaaS infrastructure on Azure is the latest major endorsement of Redmond's public cloud. Among other key customers using Azure include General Electric, Renault-Nissan, Tyco and Boeing, among others

"This coming together of the intelligent cloud with transformative SaaS applications with creativity and marketing is a massive milestone," Nadella said. This latest pact between the two companies will lead to more integrated offerings tying Office 365 and Dynamics 365 to Adobe's respective offerings, though the two companies haven't elaborated on that point.

Microsoft updated an August security advisory this week to urge organizations using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol in supported Windows systems to implement some configuration changes manually.